More efficient portfolio thanks to

offset + digital

Within a very short time, a KODAK NEXPRESS Digital Press has become established at Kirchner Print.Media as a digital equivalent to offset – for which the company likewise trusts in KODAK Plates and CTP

Image-enhancing and sales-promoting print products from the small town of Kirchlengern, half-way between Dusseldorf and Hamburg (Germany), have regularly caused something of a stir for several years now. If you have any contact with print enhancement, you’re bound to stumble on Kirchner Print.Media sooner or later. The company enjoys a reputation as a pacesetter for print finishing effects. Innovative implementations of complex, premium quality jobs are the norm at this printing house. And it’s not only customers who are frequently amazed at the tactile and visual effects which Kirchner commits to paper.

With a team of more than 70 staff, Kirchner Print.Media – which celebrated its 75th anniversary in 2014 – is one of the German printing and media industry’s leading names. One notable feature of this owner-managed company is its constant readiness to innovate, from prepress through production to print enhancement and finishing. World premieres of brand new press models and configurations repeatedly add value for customers in the market for printed communications. One eight-color and two six-color sheetfed offset presses with in-line coating systems provide almost unlimited latitude for designing blue ribbon products.

Consistent quality strategyAdvanced offset technology, UV and other special printing processes enable brilliant results in ultra-fine resolution on virtually any desired substrate. Kirchner has won various awards not only for classic offset printing but also for UV and, most recently, digital production. It comes as no surprise to learn that the company has earned distinction on numerous occasions as a finalist for a range of prestigious awards, including several Gold Awards for both the printer

itself and its products – while “senior partner” Martin Kirchner has been honored as Manager of the Year at the German Print&Media Awards. All of this is no accident but the outcome of a consistent quality strategy.

Short runs in high qualityThe plan now is to make the same high quality available in digital production as in classic offset applications – along with a very wide choice of substrates which also extends to elegant papers with higher grammages. The printing house is responding here to the unbroken trend towards short runs in high quality while at the same time strategically expanding its portfolio.

Kirchner is taking this step with a KODAK NEXPRESS Digital Press. There were many reasons for this decision, though Managing Director Alexander Kirchner cites quality as the single most outstanding argument.

Digital production at eye level with offsetA KODAK NEXPRESS ZX3300 Digital Press went into operation at Kirchner Print.Media at the beginning of

November 2017. The investment marked the final stage in a three-year planning process, during which detailed application tests were carried out at various digital press manufacturers.

“It had been clear to us for some time that we’d have to make more vigorous efforts regarding digital production if we wanted to profit from the general trend towards shorter runs and more product variants. By complementing sheetfed offset with digital, we were aiming to give our clients the option of producing low-volume jobs economically – but with quality on a par with offset,” Kirchner explains. “Our decision to acquire the NEXPRESS Press resulted from a whole series of factors. For instance, we print business stationery including business cards in large quantities for the sales and branch networks of banks and insurance companies, which we serve through closed, customized storefronts. Integrating photographs of sales staff and text in spot colors was a new challenge here. We were looking for a reliable, five-color press that would emulate HKS or PANTONE® colors perfectly using an additional ink. What’s more, in the fine fonts, the register also had to be one hundred percent with multicolor production. The NEXPRESS Press does all of that.”

Beyond CMYK: digital refinementsIf a digital job doesn’t require any of the colors red, green or blue to expand the color gamut or simulate spot colors, Kirchner Print.Media produces everything using KODAK NEXPRESS Light Black HD Dry Ink in the Fifth Imaging Unit. “We get a better gray balance that way and a greater depth of field in images; that’s something that’s very much appreciated by our customers. In any case, colored areas are impossible to imagine without

Martin and Alexander Kirchner, Managing Directors and partners of Kirchner Print.Media GmbH & Co.KG, are at the helm of this family owned firm, which employs 70 people.

Light Black and the gradients are more homogeneous,” Kirchner confirms. His company additionally works with KODAK NEXPRESS White Dry Ink in the Fifth Imaging Unit for maximum opacity on dark or colored substrates as well as with KODAK NEXPRESS Clear Dry Ink. The latter gives a fully or partially transparent topcoat to the printed sheets or adds watermarks.

The easy-to-replace matte fuser roller, which ensures that the image has a uniformly matte look and helps achieve an offset-like visual impact, is a very useful accessory. “It was a good choice to make because matte has a particular appeal for our customers in the fashion, textiles, automotive, jewelry and lifestyle sectors,” Kirchner adds. “We can get a lot of clients enthusiastic about digital printing with matte and the trend towards uncoated papers. Matte helps us to continue offering classic offset products in digital for short-run jobs such as advance copies and reprints. All small-scale reprints of catalogs or price lists run on the NEXPRESS Press. For instance, if we have to print 80 price lists, each with 800 4c sheets, we end up with a high page volume that can

be produced more economically in digital than it can in offset.”

Maximum diversity of formats and substratesIn order to fully leverage the NEXPRESS Press’ potential for the wide variety of applications in the company’s portfolio, Kirchner Print.Media also purchased the long sheet deep pile feeder and the KODAK Substrate Expansion Kit as optional features. The long sheet feeder upgrades the largest printable sheet format from 356 x 520 mm to 356 x 1000 mm. This large format is a popular choice in Kirchlengern for catalogs and advertising brochures as a simple way to achieve six or eight-page products or gatefolds.

The Substrate Expansion Kit pushes back established limits by allowing the use of thicker materials. Whereas paperboard up to 0.45 mm thick and synthetic stocks up to 0.2 mm are normally the maximum, the Expansion Kit extends the range respectively to 0.61 mm and 0.35 mm. The printer takes advantage of the opportunities created in this way to produce cartons in short runs as well as paperboard

shelf strips or labels for the retail trade – often in combination with the long sheet format.

Kirchner Print.Media can look back on a long tradition in UV offset on all kinds of plastic-like substrates, and the increased material thickness is therefore also relevant for this category. “We’re testing it more and more with 300 micron PET and hard PVC. Our test methods show very good adhesion of the Dry Inks on these substrates.” Alexander Kirchner: “They open up new possibilities for short runs because every day we use these materials to produce things like shelf strips and wobblers or plant labels in UV offset. The diversity of substrates the NEXPRESS Press supports is basically fantastic, and the paper profiles and profiling options Kodak ships with it are excellent.” All in all, the young entrepreneur is convinced that the NEXPRESS Press is the perfect production tool to develop the enormous latent business potential with both new and existing customers.

Above left: Marcus Zimmermann, Prepress Manager, inspects a fresh sheet which has been output to the NEXPRESS Press’ proof delivery. Above right: Kirchner Print.Media’s main facility in Kirchlengern. Bottom left: Changing the fuser roller on the digital press. Bottom right: A 1 m long image printed on the NEXPRESS Press.

© 2018 Kodak. Kodak, Lotem, Magnus, NexPress, Prinergy, Trillian and the Kodak logo are trademarks.

CTP prepress and digital production take place in close physical proximity. The plates are imaged on a KODAK MAGNUS Q800 Platesetter with an upstream Multi-Cassette Unit.

KODAK.COM/GO/NEXPRESS

Front cover: Platemaker Rolf Haußmann loads paper into the NEXPRESS Press’ long sheet feeder.

Similar success with Kodak in offsetIncidentally, as far as offset printing is concerned, Kirchner Print.Media has a longstanding business relationship with Kodak and the two former companies Creo and Scitex. The print provider was among the very first to embrace digitalized processes from prepress to pressroom. Back in 1998, Kirchner was one of the German pioneer users of a KODAK LOTEM Thermal Platesetter and the company has been producing with Kodak’s CTP and workflow technology without interruption ever since. Today, the plates are imaged on a KODAK MAGNUS Q800 Platesetter, which a Multi-Cassette Unit automatically feeds with plates. The CTP system is controlled and supplied with output data by a KODAK PRINERGY Workflow in the current Version 8.

The MAGNUS Q800 Platesetter mainly images plates in 3B format for the eight-color and two six-color sheetfed offset presses. One of the six-color presses is reserved for classic UV offset production, which the Kirchlengern printer favors over low-energy UV and similar processes owing to the greater

flexibility when it comes to varnishes and enhancement options.

“We’d always baked all of our plates because it was necessary for UV printing, but we’d been trying to get away from that for years. Yet whenever we used unbaked plates, there were problems with the run lengths, especially when UV was combined with matte coatings and white ink as well as on coarse substrates. The image was often worn out after only ten or fifteen thousand impressions,” reports Kirchner, whose company has more than four decades of experience in UV printing.

Following numerous attempts with different plate products, they finally changed over to the KODAK TRILLIAN SP Thermal Plate. Thanks to this negative-working high-quality plate, Kirchner Print.Media now manages between 20,000 and 25,000 impressions with unbaked TRILLIAN SP Plates and UV during production with critical matte coatings or white or around 70,000 impressions with CMYK. The figures that can be realized with conventional offset are much higher, of course, though at

present the average required run length is in the region of no more than 15,000 sheets.

“We’ve stopped baking plates altogether,” Kirchner concludes. “It’s interesting to note that since switching to the TRILLIAN SP Thermal Plate, we can also print a wider tonal range. Whereas with the old plate, the break used to occur at 3%, today even 1% dots still print, even with a 250 or 300 lpi screen. We’re thoroughly satisfied with the TRILLIAN SP Plate in general and with its scratch resistance in particular.”